As an intellectual and literary icon for a new millenium, Dave Eggers has approached the question of success and status as an "outsider," maintaining an "anti-establishment" stance even as he himself has been swept up into fame, both as a writer and publisher. In the following essay, Sarah Brouillette analyzes Eggers' "economic disavowal" and shifts critical attention to other economies and hierarchies in which Eggers' works participate. Because Eggers' mission attempts to deal with some of the issues brought forward in our own "manifesto" (published in this issue), Brouillette's discussion is especially important for readers of Reconstruction. We invite readers to bring their thoughts and ideas about these economies to our message boards.

Paratextuality and Economic Disavowal in Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity

Sarah Brouillette

<1> Dave Eggers' recent novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), concerns two friends who suddenly stumble upon a lot of money, feel guilty about it, and travel around the world trying to give it away. Like almost all of what Eggers is involved in producing, Velocity is profoundly self-justifying. In fact, if we follow Gerard Genette's model and understand a work's paratexts to be all the physical and social texts that attend its existence, controlling its dissemination and reception, then Velocity thematizes paratextuality and practices it, as a text about Eggers' career and his overriding concern with the idea of "selling out." As a work it acts to police the reception of future works and control the way we read Eggers' position in the literary marketplace. Through a brief description of some of the major aspects of Eggers' career, and a focus on the way that career has involved the establishment of a safe position both within and outside of the contemporary corporatized literary marketplace, Velocity can be read as Eggers' ultimate effort to find a way to deny motivation by financial capital while avoiding associating himself with a kind of cultural elitism that assumes the paucity of mass culture. This effort provides readers with a lens through which to view Eggers' editorial investments and future textual production. Yet despite Eggers' attempt to make the narrative work on his behalf, by suggesting his commitment to some larger social interests, the novel nonetheless comes to exemplify the peculiar way in which Eggers' entire career is built circularly on reflections on itself, and the seeming impossibility of escaping such solipsism.

<2> As a writer and editor Dave Eggers was once best known for his work on the literary journal most conveniently referred to as McSweeney's, and its popular accompanying website (www.mcsweeneys.net). The journal first appeared in 1998, and its full title varies -- issues often offer a selection of options for titles and those change from issue to issue, confusing library cataloguers. The website corresponds to the print journal and has an ardent set of followers who chart their relationship with the site, the printed journal, and other McSweeney's products in a daily letters column. In publishing the journal and the site Eggers was something of a subculture hero, but there was very little mainstream attention directed at his work and the McSweeney's enterprise as a whole. Then, in 2002, Eggers published his playfully autobiographical work, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (hereafter A Heartbreaking Work). The book was widely lauded, generating further interest in McSweeney's generally. It was published in paperback in 2001. Most recently, McSweeney's has become a publishing company, releasing texts by writers previously published in the printed journal.

<3> As an editor and author, what dominates Eggers' approach to participating in the market world of literary texts is his interest in scrutinizing and re-inventing bibliographic formats, and his constant acknowledgement of the bibliographic codes that carry and constrain the texts he participates in producing. A recurring pattern in the literary media's fascination with Eggers is the question of "selling out," and the degree to which Eggers can be accused of having done just that. This pattern exists in a nice symbiosis with many of Eggers' own concerns about his dependence on a mainstream publishing industry he finds questionable at best. All of his publishing activities -- whether as editor or author -- have involved some effort to draw our attention toward the monotony of mainstream, large-scale publishing. This is usually done through play with bibliographic formats and the creation of unique and anomalous printed objects. Eggers' work displays a consistent will toward transparency about publishing processes. His disclosure of information about things like profits and design decisions (consistent to both McSweeney's and A Heartbreaking Work) can be said to be the result of a fear about the way commercial success relies on the creative energies of subcultures and appropriates their better parts, leaving them debunked and illegitimate in the eyes of their original fans. His interaction with the corporate literary marketplace makes disclosure necessary as a form of pre-empting criticism and showing the degree to which he is canny about the processes that control and allow literary success -- a form of success which continues to trouble participants in the literary field.

<4> Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 40) has charted the tensions in the relationship between literary production and the commercial sphere. He maintains that within the present sphere of capitalist cultural production "temporal failure" has become a "sign of election," and success is deemed a lack of the autonomy or disinterest that sanctions legitimate literary practice. He further claims that the opposition between the commercial and the non-commercial is the same figural opposition used to distinguish "art" from mere commodities. In other words, the logic of a pre-capitalist economy lives on in the literary marketplace, as it continues to maintain "a trade in things that have no price"(75). These tensions are precisely those that have so concerned Eggers throughout his career. Examples abound. In A Heartbreaking Work -- published at the pinnacle of Eggers' subcultural stardom as editor of McSweeney's -- he provides readers with a precise accounting of the money he made in publishing the novel in hardcover, and even offers to reimburse readers who write in with proof of purchase. His anxieties about publishing the book were compounded by the fact that its content was his troubled family history and the death of his parents from cancer. On the McSweeney's website he has continually discredited the notion that in publishing the book he was at all interested in self-promotion. In interview he consistently points out that he has not made nearly as much money from subsequent book and film rights as readers may think, and that he donates much of his money to cancer research and to the establishment of a non-profit writing education centre for teenagers.

<5> As Bourdieu so carefully points out, though, the process of distinguishing oneself from the market still requires the forging of fields of cultural capital that function comparably to the larger market they seek to disavow. So, while Eggers has thoroughly documented his fear of direct association with the mass production of literary/artistic works, he has not by any means refused to participate in the marketplace in general, and has instead directed his energies toward finding new ways to manufacture quality objects that embody the contradictions of his position. What he is engaged in is, essentially, the mass production of objects that aim to distinguish themselves from the abundance of disposable works on display at the average major chain bookstore. The subculture that has grown up around Eggers is made up of fans that want to say something about themselves through the objects they consume. Thus Eggers' cachet involves the production of an elite culture, which is not necessarily or obviously a more secure position from which to observe the functioning of literary markets in general. How could Eggers avoid the charge that he is simply engaged in the creation of an alternate form of cultural capital, elitist in its formation and guilty of insularity, and more particularly guilty of denying its own dependence on the field of mass cultural production? In other words, how could Eggers avoid the charge that he had in fact sold out to the very idea of selling out? These are precisely the questions that Velocity aims to answer, or at least divert.

<6> With the above questions in mind, those interested in Eggers were substantially concerned with how he would handle the publication of a new novel, especially given that the McSweeney's enterprise had recently developed its own publishing company [1]. That company was committed to paying attention to the quality of bibliographic formats in a way consistent with what Eggers had previously accomplished. Literary gossip said that Eggers could not publish his new novel with a major publisher -- any of which would have been eager to acquire the follow-up to A Heartbreaking Work, a major bestseller -- when his own small, independent company was available, and when he had consistently denied being motivated by financial concerns.

<7> When the book was finally released literary journalists in every major North American city wrote articles about Eggers' unusual resolution of these issues. Velocity was published in late 2002 by the McSweeney's publishing branch. Its publication and distribution make a fascinating story in themselves, as they document Eggers' haphazard and confused wish to attain cultural capital and wide-scale recognition, while at least seeming to pose some continued challenge to the usual publishing system he had previously spoken against. The McSweeney's publishing branch printed 50,000 copies of the book in total: 10,000 to be sold exclusively on the McSweeney's website and in some way personally inscribed by Eggers, 40,000 to be more widely distributed. The planned distribution was unusual: in the United States the book would be shipped directly to and only carried by the independent and small bookstores already supporting McSweeney's materials, and would not be sold through the major bookstore chains. Yet in Canada the book was widely available, distributed through Door Mouse (the usual Canadian distributor) to any willing bookstore (Heer, 2002). In an odd twist that will likely jeopardize all of Eggers' future claims to a counter-cultural purity, he hired Andrew Wylie ("The Jackal"), known as one of New York's most ruthless literary agents, to handle subsequent contracts relating to the novel. There was no advertising budget for the book, but the fact that Eggers veritably self-published it and restricted its distribution was enough to ensure its publication would be widely reported. There were no review copies sent out, but a portion was excerpted in The New Yorker months before publication (a move which usually guarantees a book's success), followed by a lengthy online interview. British rights were sold to Penguin, foreign and translation rights have already been negotiated, and it has been rumoured that Wylie is negotiating a nearly million-dollar contract for the paperback with a major publisher. Nevertheless, in interview Eggers has consistently focused only on the way the hardcover is being treated in the United States, going so far as to state unequivocally that those who care about their writing should care about how it is packaged and sold. In interview with The New Yorker (2002) he said: "I think that if you care about your writing, then you care about how it makes its way into the world, and self-publishing is one good way to make sure it comes out the way you'd envisioned. But we'll see. It could all go horribly, horribly wrong."

<8> Indeed, the very idea that there is something financially virtuous (or potentially "horribly wrong") about publishing the North American hardcover through McSweeney's has been questioned. Dennis Loy Johnson (2002), editor of a popular contemporary culture website with some similarities to McSweeney's, provided a potential profit breakdown on the site just after the novel was published. Johnson questions the notion that there is some risk for Eggers in self-publishing on several bases. First, there is no question that 50,000 copies of They Shall Know Our Velocity will sell [2]. Second, Eggers has effectively cut out the publishing go-betweens by avoiding the chain stores, which take up to 60 percent of a novel's cover price. "Eggers could be making as much as 60 percent or more of the $22 [US] cover price," he argues, "say anywhere from $12-$15 per copy." Alternately, in a good deal with a major publisher he would have made about $3 per copy. Thus, Johnson writes, Eggers could make as much as $150,000 for the first 10,000 copies of the novel, sold on his website.

<9> The novel itself is a beautiful and high-quality physical object, with some similarity to the more recent issues of McSweeney's. It has a matte, grainy cover made from a soft paperboard, with no paper jacket and a title only appearing on the book's spine. The text of the novel begins on the outside cover (see Figure 1). Copyright information is unusually placed in the book's final opening, and the publisher information is on the back cover. It is standard for all McSweeney's products to be supported through the key paratextual use of the group's website. That is, through the website Eggers and his cohorts work to situate and promote new products, and the new book is no exception. Indeed Eggers has engaged in what seems to be an unprecedented use of a website as a potential place to create a list of errata, interacting with his own work as a printed text in a way that assumes most of those who would read it would also be involved in the web of texts offered through the site. Thus, Eggers corrects the edition's typos directly online, providing a line obscured by an image during the printing process, and various fixes to other minor errors ("A few production/correction notes").

<10> The narrative itself is of significant interest given Eggers' career. While A Heartbreaking Work is considered a memoir, throughout the narrative Eggers points to the troubled relationship between fact and fiction, having characters say things they could never have said, pointing out his own inconsistencies and the necessary reliance of the entire narrative on various kinds of fiction. With Velocity the opposite is the case: the narrative itself is classified as fiction, but has interesting significance for those readers familiar with Eggers' media persona and interaction with literary journalists. What reading the novel and its attendant paratexts reveals is that when it comes to Dave Eggers the often dueling discourses of bibliographic and literary meaning are inseparable. A fuller definition of paratextuality is thus in order. Gerard Genette (1997, 1-3) argues that paratexts make up a discourse surrounding texts and are proliferating during our "media age." They accompany a text, "in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text's presence in the world, its 'reception' and consumption." A text's paratext is made up of both peritexts (existing within the bounds of the printed book), and epitexts (those texts that attend and modify the text and its author in the larger marketplace and social world). Peritexts normally exist in "the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies)." The epitext is more complicated and diffuse. Genette's delineation of paratextuality is useful in emphasizing the important functional relationship between things like prefaces, titles, formats, interviews, and blurbs, and the "text itself" that those elements prop up. One of the most interesting aspects of Eggers' authorship is his effort to control all the aspects of his paratextual world, by acting as author, editor and publisher, as self-critic and self-defender. While Genette maintains that the paratext ultimately always exists in a subordinate functional relationship to the "text itself," what Eggers orchestrates is precisely the elision between these separate fields. Stated simply, he makes form and content inseparable to an unusual degree, and thus offers himself to readers as a figure with a uniquely informed perspective on contemporary print culture. Looking at the way this unique perspective has been expressed in his earlier work as author and editor clarifies the issues Velocity articulates.

<11> In A Heartbreaking Work, for example, the status of subcultural authority within a mediated culture -- something key to considerations of Eggers' career -- is a recurring theme. At one point in the book Eggers gives an account of the experience shared by him and his friends as they founded and managed Might magazine in a San Francisco possessed by MTV's new reality television program, The Real World. Eggers recalls their thoughts about the status of the magazine: "we and our magazine, can't let on that we're part of this scene, or any scene. We begin to perfect a balance between being close to where things are happening [. . .] while keeping our distance, an outsider's mentality, even among other outsiders"(151). This will to be both part of and distanced from a "scene" feeds into their interaction with MTV's show. Cast-member Judd is offered illustration work with Might, and the discussion set to take place between he and the Might editors will naturally be taped (The Real World has cameras follow its subjects constantly, though that footage is finally edited down for an hour long show). Eggers recalls how wilfully he and his fellow editors prepared for the event, and constrained their on camera performance. "We have opted out," Eggers claims, "taken the ultimate apathetic approach to looks and attire, have moved past the check-me-out look, past the look of rejecting-the-check-me-out-look-in-favor-of darkly-rebellious look -- have rejected both and have chosen a kind of elegance through refusal -- the check-me-out-if-you-must look-but-you'll-get-no-encouragement-from-me look -- the look of absolutely no look at all." There is an absolute necessity of making clear to savvy MTV viewers "that if you look closely, we are winking, smirking ever so slightly, that all this, our meeting with him, the cameras and everything, will probably be used in Might as fodder for some kind of wry and trenchant article or ha-ha chart soon enough."

<12> Eggers could be accused here of snobbery and pretension, but to avoid this accusation he admits that the camera guy and sound guy see through the ruse. They are "clearly unimpressed," convinced that "we like everyone else simply want our lives on tape, proven, feel that what we are doing only becomes real once it has been entered into the record"(213-215). In this passage, then, Eggers clearly dramatizes the necessity of demonstrating one's awareness of the construction of images and the will to resist those images. He and his friends at Might magazine want to be set apart, to stand out, but by not standing out at all, by appearing entirely indifferent to the entire process. Yet of course there is no such indifference. This canniness about the relationship between the mainstream and subcultural authority has a sure connection with Eggers' early career, both direct in that it involves commentary on his work with Might, and figural in that it suggests Eggers' larger efforts to control his public image and avoid "selling out."

<13> This depth of self-consciousness is doubly present throughout the book: first, Eggers is explicitly aware of the fact that he is writing a troubled narrative, since he is offering readers an autobiographical account of events in his life, and those events involve extreme traumas of personal familial relationships. Eggers and his siblings lose their two parents in rapid succession. Dave assumes primary responsibility for the family's youngest son, Christopher ("Toph"), and they move from a suburb of Chicago to San Francisco. Much of the book involves the way the lives of two young men are changed by the loss of parental control, authority, and love. Eggers uses the book to both relay these events and to question that narrative process from various angles. Second, he is notably aware of the book as a physical object, a printed text within a literary marketplace selling commodified cultural products. The book exists in two forms. There is a hardcover, published by Simon & Schuster in 2000. Simon & Schuster sold the paperback rights to Vintage for a reported $1.4 million, who published it in 2001. The paperback is available with three different covers, and the process of interacting with Vintage executives and encouraging them to do innovative things with the paperback as a form is detailed by Dave Eggers in excruciating detail on the McSweeney's website. Unlike most novelists, Eggers made some significant changes to the book before the paperback came out, adding an additional section of definite interest to fans of the original book.

<14> The hardcover copyright page, traditionally the realm of official literary culture -- carrying publishing information, library classifications codes [3], etc -- has some unusual information about the novel's copyright. Under the somewhat usual "Copyright © 2000 David ("Dave") Eggers / All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form," the text continues:

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Simon & Schuster, a division of a larger and more powerful company called Viacom Inc., which is wealthier and more populous than eighteen of the fifty states of America, all of Central America, and all of the former Soviet Republics combined and tripled. That said, no matter how big such companies are, or how many things they own, or how much money they have or make or control, their influence over the daily lives and hearts of individuals, and thus, like ninety-nine percent of what is done by official people in cities like Washington, or Moscow, or Sao Paulo or Auckland, their effect on the short, fraught lives of human being who limp around and sleep and dream of flying through bloodstreams, who love the smell of rubber cement and think of space travel while having intercourse, is very very small, and so hardly worth worrying about.

Now, whether or not a reader agrees with such a statement, it is hard to deny that it is an odd way of stating copyright, particularly in a widely marketed book published by the sort of multinational corporation the author brings to our attention. Such challenges to the regular system of contemporary publishing and regular nature of printed texts more or less define Dave Eggers' project as a writer, editor, and now publisher. The novel's embodiment of Eggers' ethic of disclosure mirrors the bibliographic self-consciousness of all McSweeney's ventures. Disclosure serves very explicit purposes, in that it allows Eggers to pretend to a kind of honesty about the writing process through which he pre-empts critique. He admits his awareness of the constraints that readers might accuse him of working under, in both the realm of composition and that of editing. Eggers is engaged in a systematic effort at maintaining the legitimacy of his authority and authorship/editorship, finding a safe position from which to create textual products within a field that still denounces wide-spread success and vilifies commercial interests. Thus, his use of the copyright page is instructive: he at once points out his awareness of the fact that his book -- a book by a writer normally associated with a small circulation literary journal printed in Iceland, and a website that refuses to support advertisements -- is being published by a major publishing company. If he could be accused of sacrificing some of his principles for economic and cultural capital, he must at the very least ensure that readers know he is aware of such processes. He goes further than this, in making a polemical argument against his potential critics by suggesting that major corporations are finally insignificant to everyday life anyways, and are thus not at all that important and nothing with which one should fear associating. He pre-empts criticism and addresses it in the same short passage.

<15> The Vintage paperback edition of Eggers' work appeared in 2001. The status and interest of the paperback is famously explored in a controversial New York Times interview done by David Kirkpatrick (Kirkpatrick became subject to Eggers' scorn due to the tone of his article, in a controversy given full coverage on the McSweeney's website). Kirkpatrick details the paperback's "attention-getting twists," which include "a new appendix correcting and updating the original, an upside-down back cover creating a book that seems to open from either end [this description is weak, since in fact the book does open from either end, and is two separate pieces of writing], and three different versions, each with its own cover illustration." As Kirkpatrick wrote his article, 200,000 copies of the hardcover were in print. Eggers claims that the sum he received for the paperback rights meant he himself was uninterested in how well the book sold. He could explore, then, odd presentation techniques, if he could convince Vintage's reluctant executives to follow along. This process included his invention of an "S-shaped" binding (involving two paperbacks joined at the spine, with pages opening on either side, each upside-down from the other), but it was deemed impossible to realize and too expensive to produce. The company eventually agreed to have the book open at both ends, and to allow for up to six separate covers (Kirkpatrick only mentions three, since that is what was finally decided on, due to the fact that Eggers could not come up with six that would satisfy him). Kirkpatrick claims the three editions "guarantees media attention and may even lure buyers who already own the hardcover book," while Eggers adamantly denies that increasing sales was ever his intention, citing instead his interest in doing something interesting and innovative simply because he could. Longstanding Eggers' fans would have been disappointed, after all, with anything less.

<16> The paperback, then, is two books in one. The reader opens one end to find the book as it was, with the same introductory materials, the same Preface and Acknowledgements. At the other end we find an added editorial section called "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making," with extensive inquiries into the process of book and text making, and which incorporates a response to the reception of the hardcover book. The section is said to contain, quite accurately, "Notes, Corrections, Clarifications, Apologies" and "Addenda," and alternately "Complaints, Weaslings, Pedantry," and "Showboating"(Figure 2). Much interest lies in how Eggers reinvents the posturing put forth in the hardcover text. For example, on the copyright page, instead of a rant about the role of corporations in the lives of individuals, we find a commentary on the critical reception of Eggers' earlier use of the copyright page:

The author wishes to reserve the right to use spaces like this, and to work within them, for no other reason than it entertains him and a small coterie of readers. It does not mean that anything ironic is happening. It does not mean that someone is being pomo or meta or cute. It simply means that someone is writing in small type, in a space usually devoted to copyright information, because doing so is fun.

"Further," he goes on, pre-empting future reception,

the fact that this paperback version starts from both sides, and that a reader must turn it over, lengthwise, to read from side or the other, does not mean that it is frivolous or, in parlance, too clever for its own good. It simply means that this was the best way to approach the problem of the appendix, which does not start from where the book leaves off, but starts from another point, an opposite point. In general, not everything that is new is trendy; not everything that is different is gimmicky; not everything that is truthful must fall within well-known formal parameters.

The material contained in this added section generally involves what its title and subtitle suggest. Eggers carefully incorporates the criticisms of his earlier text, shaping his readers' opinions about the intents and purposes of his narrative.

<17> Additional material aside, perhaps the key way Eggers constrains his reception is through the use of the McSweeney's website. The symbiosis between the site and Eggers' general career is perhaps most apparent in considering Kirkpatrick's "interview" with Eggers and subsequent New York Times article (as mentioned above), which Eggers recounts and reformulates on the website's "Clarification Page." Kirkpatrick wrote, among other things, that "Despite public disavowals of making money from his work, Mr. Eggers had also made it clear that he does not much like sharing the proceeds. For example, he refused to pay his former literary agent, Elyse Cheney, a cut of the $2 million he got for the film rights." Eggers' reaction to this piece has a number of aspects: first, he "clarifies" the piece by commenting on Kirkpatrick's assertion and complicating the "facts" the article is based upon. Second, he gives a detailed account of his original interaction with Kirkpatrick, who aggressively sought an interview with Eggers, but whom Eggers was supposedly eager to avoid due to industry gossip about his questionable tendencies as a journalist. Third, Eggers reprints the entire correspondence that took place between him and Kirkpatrick, letting readers see the pained process through which the article was constructed. These various aspects involve Eggers' debunking journalism's pretensions to disinterest. He points out, on the subject of the Cheney lawsuit, "Kirkpatrick admits he is a friend of the person who is suing me. That is enough, in most journalistic circles, to immediately disqualify a reporter from writing about a subject." He claims, also, that Kirkpatrick "editorialized" in writing that Eggers "refused to pay his former literary agent [. . .] a cut of the $2 million he got for the film rights to his book and recently settled a lawsuit she filed to collect it." Eggers engages in his own editorialized rebuff, writing: "Claiming that the lawsuit was a matter of my not liking to 'share' money is a sophomoric way of characterizing a very complex and sensitive issue." He also slights Kirkpatrick for allowing publishing executives to speak for him, relying heavily on Russell Perrault at Vintage "as a source and as a stand-in." Eggers insists that Perrault is not his publicist - "I don't have one and never have had one" -- but is rather a publicist ,,for Vintage.., for the corporation itself (an interesting distinction), which is merely Eggers' publisher. <18> Reprinting the exchange of letters between himself and Kirkpatrick is a clever move, though cruel, and is seemingly the way Eggers guarantees that his statements about the article do not seem like retrospective acts of recuperation. The letters very carefully reflect Eggers' wish to distance himself from the marketing of his works. Asked about the paperback and its multiple covers, he writes:

The part about it not being some marketing ploy is important to me. Seems like any time anyone wants to do something different it's called a ploy -- as if to punish anyone who wants to deviate from custom. The multiple covers were my idea just because I like multiple options and always have. I don't stand to gain from it, just as McSwys didn't stand to gain from our multiple-cover issue [#5].

He is explicit about this disavowal of the capital involved throughout the exchange, and makes statements that quite strikingly contradict the tone of Kirkpatrick's article as eventually published. "Again, without fibbing hugely," he tells him, "you can't claim that I give a whoop about sales or money or that shit. Enough people have already read the book for my tastes, and I don't need any more money. If I did, I would have a) not self-published my next book (I would have taken a nice hefty advance from someone like S&S or Knopf); b) Not have given away just about everything I've gotten so far; c) Chosen to publish others' books without making a dime." The same tone pervades his further discussion of the paperback deal, and thus including the letters also performs the function of allowing Eggers to clarify his intentions for his readers, in his own words and in a context he has created. "S&S [Simon & Schuster] auctioned the rights," he told Kirkpatrick, "which of course removes any real control (from me at least) from the process. Because the rights were S&S's, they conducted the auction and sold the rights without me ever signing anything. (I'm responding here to weird intimations that I was the architect of the sale -- far from it, the rights being S&S's and not mine.)" The huge sum the paperback rights were sold for was thus not something with which Eggers wants to admit association. He is much more interested in taking responsibility for the form of the unusual text. He says, among other things, "generally, the idea, as always, was to have fun with the covers; it wasn't any effort to sell two or three books to any given person. (After all, because Vintage pretty much put all their money up front, it doesn't matter much to me how many copies it sells; they care of course but I was just doing it for fun.) [. . .]. Same reason Lawrence Krauser designed 10,000 covers of his book. It was something to do, and it relieves the monotony."

<19> There is a way in which Eggers has always denied that what he does with texts has any significance larger than his own desire to keep himself amused and to avoid " the monotony" of his relatively privileged life. The relationship between cultural privilege and the kind of play in which Eggers is involved is precisely the content of Velocity, and a consideration of it will be the concern of the rest of this study. Velocity -- though fictional -- is a commentary on the proliferating paratexts associated with authorship in a "media age." In this case Eggers' commentary revolves less around a concern with the divide between subcultural authority and the mainstream, and more with a direct interrogation and disavowal of any interest in economic capital. Eggers was not significantly wealthy or famous until after the publication of A Heartbreaking Work, so it is fitting that in his later work his attention has shifted to dealing with having actually achieved some undeniable success. Velocity concerns two friends named Will and Hand. Will, who narrates, has recently acquired a large amount of money more or less by luck. He had his picture taken and reproduced in silhouette for a brochure put out by a contractor he was working for. An advertising agency noticed the image and thought it ideal for the packaging for a light bulb manufacturer. That manufacturer then owed Will substantial royalties. It is important to my argument that this financial transaction involves the mass reproduction of Will's image, and that Will financially benefits from allowing a company to use a shadowy, mediated image of himself to sell its products (Figure 3). The same relationship obtains when Eggers interacts with publishers and promoters of literary texts, who use his authorial image (not an image of some full self, but a mediated image carefully monitored), to sell books to which they own the rights. In other words, Will's sudden wealth is dependent on contemporary marketing and the mass print production of light bulb packaging. The link between this and Eggers' own career is only one small instance of a more general dependence of the narrative on figures of Eggers' own experiences.

<20> The money, Will's thoughts about it, and his attempt to get rid of it form the crux of the entire narrative. Will is profoundly upset by his sudden wealth, and convinces his friend Hand to travel around the world with him, distributing it to people more worthy. His will to be rid of all the money is mysteriously related to the death of his close friend Jack, and the revelation of the connection between that death and the money is part of the narrative's drama.

<21> Will repeatedly states his desire to be rid of the money. "I never wanted a balance in a bank account," he says, "felt so much more comfortable living on the equator just above and below a zero balance" (15). "And now I would get rid of it, or most of it, and believed purging would provide clarity" (4). "God I hated this money, and this was why; it recast me and refracted my vision" (39). Giving the money away proves more difficult than he and Hand had thought, and their acts of charity take on a particular logic, both men feeling profoundly uncomfortable when confronted with real need and the poverty of beggars. They instead find themselves only wanting to give money to those they for one reason or another deem totally innocent. In other words, in accordance with Eggers' own experiences, only those who do not ask for or want capital are worthy to receive it (118). As they travel through Morocco, Senegal, Latvia, and other lands, their charitable acts become random and they construct elaborate plots to make giving the money away easier. It is as though they feel guilty about just having the money to begin with, too guilty to confront those they would give it to. "It's like returning something you've stolen," Will tells Hand (183). They consider, for example, taping the money in an envelope to the side of an animal in a farmer's field. They also construct a treasure map and hiding place, liking the idea of young children in pursuit of gold. As the narrative unfolds and the friends travel from place to place, it becomes clear that the book is significantly interested in the status of charity and the issues of humanitarian aid, something Eggers has shown extended interest in previously, both through his own much publicized acts of charity and the publication of several articles about humanitarian agencies in both Might and McSweeney's. "Every act of charity has choice at its core," Will states (257).

<22> The connection these acts and Will's efforts to understand them have with Jack's death (and with a disfiguring beating Will randomly suffered just before the time of the voyage) is not made clear until later in the narrative. There are two kinds of connection eventually established, one explicit and one more tentative, each revealing in terms of Eggers' effort throughout the novel to develop a relationship with his own wealth. First, more explicitly, we learn that just after Jack's accident Will became convinced that he could use the money to somehow help him recover. Will and Hand had been with Jack just before the car accident that landed him in the hospital in critical condition with serious spinal injuries. After arriving at the hospital Will and Hand spend hours wandering the parking lot thinking about what to do to help Jack, partially out of a desperate need to ease their own guilt about their last encounter with Jack, when they could not convince him that their evening plans were worth participating in. In the usual logic of such guilt, they think if they could have been more accommodating Jack never would have been in the accident. They develop all sorts of strange schemes in that parking lot, and finally stumble upon the idea that they could use all the money, all the new money made from the light bulb packaging contract, to buy Jack some expensive surgery, such as, for example, an experimental spinal cord surgery for sale in Chiapas, Mexico. "The money had a purpose," Will claims. "I felt a divine order that I'd never known before" (299). But no such surgery is necessary. Jack dies and Will is left to feel that again the money is entirely useless, undeserved and with no real purpose.

<23> It is significant that the money is connected to Jack's death in this way, since Eggers' own ascent to literary fame was -- as many have commented -- built on a story about the deaths of his own parents and his telling (and selling) of the traumatic story of their illness and pain. Velocity expresses an anxiety about the proper social acquisition and distribution of general wealth. As such an explicit connection between the money and Jack's death relates to the more tentative connection Velocity generally makes between suffering and socio-cultural privilege. Will comes to tell himself that his privileged status as a relatively wealth American citizen cannot be understood without some understanding of how that wealth depends on the poverty of countless others throughout the world. He says, for example: "We were given things that others have not been given. We had a clean 7-11 within walking distance -- we had -- this is the reason they took Jack. And why my face is mangled. This is simple and deserved retribution" (282). This is of course about much more than Eggers' literary status and career (it has, for example, surely much to do with the terrorist demolition of the World Trade Center in 2001), but it also goes some way toward explaining his constant desire to distance himself from the money that comes with successful participation in the mainstream Anglo-American publishing industry. Eggers substantially legitimates his own authorial position here, by constructing a socially informed opposition to structural inequality. Velocity importantly gives Eggers' disavowal of financial capital and his attachment to charitable acts an explanation and justification. "This is our punishment for our hubris, for our brutality," Will says in explanation of what both Jack and he had suffered (282). Will sees himself as guilty just by fact of his cultural privilege. Thus, Eggers' usual aversion to admitting to any financial motivation is given a rationale that extends beyond the literary field and into his guilty feelings about his privileged status as a white American who can be said to be simply engaged in the sort of formal "play" his position allows.

<24> This is an important move on Eggers' part, since he places himself in a distinctly separate sphere from that characterized by Bourdieu, who theorized authorial aversion to financial capital as part of an effort made to distinguish authorship from other kinds of labor, and to maintain the separation between the general commercial sphere and "real" art. According to Bourdieu's formulation, in fact, Eggers' rather aligns himself with a non-elite literary tradition by directly placing his work in the realm of socially concerned literature that eschews formalism. Making the activities of Will and Hand a figure for his own troubled authorial position is a compelling move. It gives Eggers' readers the tools to understand his aversion to financial capital as something motivated by a desire other than a will to achieve a cultural greatness not tainted by interaction with commodity culture. That aversion can instead by seen as a sincere form of social responsibility motivated by general cultural guilt and humanitarian sympathies.

<25> This significantly changes what we can make of Eggers' play with bibliographic formats and interest in publishing reform. Eggers has repeatedly claimed he has done something unusual because he "could," or because it was "fun." The editorial material for the fifth issue of McSweeney's (2000), for example, explains the development of the McSweeney's publishing company as follows:

We are talking about smaller and leaner operations that use the available resources and speed and flexibility of the market [. . .] to enable us to make not cheaper and cruder (print-on-demand) books or icky, cold, robotic (electronic) books, but better books, perfect and permanent hardcover books, to do so in a fiscally sound way, and to do so not just for old time's sake, but because it makes sense and gives us, us people with fingers and eyes, what we want and what we've always wanted: beautiful things, beautiful things in our hands -- to be surrounded by little heavy papery beautiful things.

The focus here on "paper beautiful things" is profoundly aestheticizing, offering no effort at connection between the activities of McSweeney's and the larger world of capital and commodity production. Indeed, separation from mass production is the only conceivable aim of this urge to distance oneself from what is "cheap," "crude" or "icky." Eggers' editorial work and creative reinvention of bibliographic formats is announced as a simple effort to give aesthetic pleasure to people interested in a consumer lifestyle that sets them apart form the mass of their fellow consumers. It is Velocity that announces Eggers' effort to make more of his career than the above passage, establishing his aversion to the contemporary literary marketplace as grounded in a more general contempt of profit as a motivation for human behaviour.

<26> All of this said, it is significant that Will and Hand have to ease themselves into charitable acts: cultural privilege pervades their interactions with poverty in general, making them incapable of confronting the poor as individuals. They resist the human connection that comes with the act of passing money to those in need. In that sense, they are incapable of gifting the money they have. Instead they develop textual mediations -- the envelope, the treasure map -- to make the process blind and impersonal, to safely transfer the money and diffuse their guilt without confronting the poverty that is its cause. Eggers, similarly, uses the indirect means of textual production to attempt to change the way the literary marketplace is organized, gaining cultural capital through the denial of financial interests, devoting profits to further textual production and to charity concerns. Will and Hand do not manage to evade their complicity with contemporary structural inequality, but at least they acknowledge it. Eggers does the same. He is, after all, a media darling, and as such his position within the literary marketplace is entrenched and privileged. He can only engage in the sort of creative work he does -- inventing several different covers for the same book, making readers search for his works in independent bookstores -- because of his position of relative comfort within the mainstream market he so carefully rejects. Perhaps more importantly, the paratextual work that Velocity does remains solipsistic. The novel wants to get beyond its author as a paratextual entity who embodies a system of commodity production, but it can only act as another expression of that authorial desire to control and constrain the reception of texts. Eggers' urge to promote certain readings of his works and his career subsumes the other uses of his texts, becoming their dominant function. In turn, Velocity, a novel about financial disavowal, becomes another means through which Eggers' attempts to accrue capital in its other forms. In the realm of consumption, the urge toward social responsibility expressed in his novel becomes a part of its use value as a means through which its readers construct their own identities as consumers. Eggers aims to look beyond the McSweeney's enterprise and into the larger world, but cannot escape the charge that his expression of that aim is yet another product of his inability to achieve it.

Notes

[1]The people at McSweeney's had in general been involved, in this period, in a flurry on new promotional activities and odd developments. They announced, for example, their intention to reprint the notoriously under-available first three issues of McSweeney's, and to package them as a box set for Christmas 2002. Some of the journal's writers -- including Eggers -- went on a strange musical tour with They Might Be Giants, the band that created the CD to accompany the journal's sixth issue. The website also started to promote its publication of the first American edition of Sheila Heti's The Middle Tales. Heti is a Canadian author who published several short stories in the fourth issue of McSweeney's, and who saw her career flourish after their appearance. At one point Eggers put out a call on the website for readers in the Boston area to come out and help some McSweeney's representatives apply the missing stickers to a shipment of Heti's book that had just arrived in a warehouse. Fans crowded the warehouse, in an act that accords with the spontaneity and public participation that often characterizes what goes on at McSweeney's. Finally, the website became part of web ring made up of four small presses, found at http://www.bigsmallpressmall.com. Indeed the extent and breadth of activities now associated with McSweeney's in general make it very hard to classify it as an organization. Is it a business, a general cultural network, a literary clique, or a movement? [^]

[2] This is course just speculation on Johnson's part. The book in fact has not done nearly as well as the previous, and is not by any means flying off the shelves of those independent bookstores sanctioned to carry it. Indeed in Toronto it is readily available, months after its release, at major bookstores and the smaller independent stores that usually carry McSweeney's.[^]

[3] Beneath the usual library cataloguing information, the page also contains what Eggers presumably considered a catalogue of himself: "Height: 5'11''; weight: 170; Eyes: blue; Hair: brown; Hands: chubbier than one would expect; Allergies: only to dander; Place on the sexual-orientation scale, with 1 being perfectly straight, and 10 being perfectly gay: [a line graph appears here on which he ranks himself a 3]." [^]

Works Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Eggers, Dave. (2000). Editorial material. McSweeney's 5.

---. (2001). A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York: Simon & Schuster.

---. (2002). Interview. The New Yorker online. 12 Aug 2002. 15 Jan 2003 <http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?020812on_onlineonly01>.

---. (2002a). You Shall Know Our Velocity. New York: McSweeney's Books.

Heer, Jeet. "For love -- and money: a heartbreaking tale of mega success." National Post, 12 October 2002: SP5.

Genette, Gerard. (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge UP.

Johnson, Denis Loy. (2002). "Backlash Backlash." MOBYlives. 21 Oct 2002. 15 Jan 2003 <http://www.mobylives.com/Backlash.html>.

Kirkpatrick, David. (2001). "Denouncing Profits and Publishers while Profiting from Publication." New York Times. Section E. 14 Feb 2001. UMI Proquest, Robarts Library, University of Toronto, 15 Jan 2003 <http://www.umi.com/proquest/>.

McSweeney's. "Clarification Page." 15 Jan 2003 <http://www.mcsweeneys.net/news/clar_mnews.html>.

---. "A few production/correction notes about the Eggers book." 15 Jan 2003 <http://www.mcsweeneys.net/books/production.html>.